Here lies a father, p.15
Here Lies a Father, page 15
“Nice meeting you too.” I opened his rather long and heavy passenger-side door and pushed it harder than normal to stay open, otherwise it would’ve closed on me. Then I turned to my uncle. “Neil, now that we all met, do you think we’ll be like a real family now? Visit each other a couple of times a year for the holidays or whatever?”
He smacked his lips and looked out the windshield at the dark sky. “Nope, probably not.”
I let go of the car door. “Well, like I said, it was nice to meet you.”
SUNDAY
CHAPTER 18
NOT UNTIL THE NEXT MORNING when I opened my eyes on Marie’s couch did it truly sink in that my weekend was coming to an end. Soon I’d be back to my regular life, yet I knew it would never be the same. My concern over the whereabouts of Eveline, and my uncertainty over Scott, would return to me like high tide. Scott and I had reconnected in the hospital after his accident, but it felt unnatural. Now I struggled to foresee how much longer we’d both keep trying to be friends, like a failed marriage where neither husband nor wife can accept the truth. The hardest part of growing up, I realized, was loss. No matter how perfect you thought it was, or how perfect you tried to force it to be, you eventually lost something. Not that loss was always a bad thing because it freed you up to make new memories, as long as you kept looking forward.
Marie was overly warm to me that morning, catering to my every whim, as if she felt sorry for me. She brewed a fresh pot of coffee and even fixed a batch of airy waffles, drenched in melted butter and drizzled with syrup. We spoke for a few minutes at her kitchen table as I ate, about nothing substantial. In those final hours we both detached emotionally from our intense weekend, acclimating ourselves to the real lives awaiting us on Monday morning. I showered after breakfast. Once again I cleaned my only outfit in the washer and channel-surfed in her vaudeville bathrobe as I waited. Marie insisted on driving me to the bus station on Main Street, but I told her I preferred to walk because I wanted the fresh air. I pointed out how I had already made the walk after Catherine left town and the weather was perfect. She conceded finally and gave me a strong hug.
As far as Marie knew I was catching the morning bus, but I wouldn’t set foot on a bus until well after noon. The night before, after Neil had dropped me off, I pulled Marie’s address book from a cabinet drawer and searched for Janice, the only person who refused to attend my father’s funeral and Marie’s gathering. I flipped through pages in a paranoid fury until I found it. I obsessed all night about not squandering my only opportunity to meet everyone from my father’s previous life. I’d never be back again, so it was now or never.
I crossed a park in the center of town. A handful of crumbling benches were scattered around its rim, places where parents could watch their children play on the grass in the summertime. A marble statue dedicated to war veterans stood in one corner. Dozens of New Brimfield men had been lost in the Second World War, according to the monument, and not one of them was named Daly. I never expected my family to be on the statue, but I read the names nonetheless. An old man wearing a wool sweater, thick and fraying at the seams, sat reading a newspaper on one of the rusty benches. Behind him a woman struggled with a feisty Chihuahua and scooped up the dog’s crap with a green bag she wore like a glove.
Wandering the streets of New Brimfield felt oddly like home. I recalled one of the afternoons I’d walked Eveline home, when all I wanted to do was dump her on the front porch so I could be alone again, and return to my weary house on West Street. Now I wondered where she had gone. I came up with a number of reasonable explanations: her father had transferred jobs; the family had upgraded to a house closer to Albany; or she’d caught a bad flu and checked into the hospital. Unfortunately, the rumor mill at school was in overdrive and I heard a range a stories, the most prevalent being her enrollment in an alternative school for pregnant girls. That’s where girls go when they sleep around a lot, they said. As much as everyone in school manufactured ridiculous and improbable stories, no one really knew where she’d gone.
Eventually, I arrived at a quaint house down a cross street running south from the park. My head bounced like a dog tracking a bone, up and down, matching the address I had scribbled on a piece of paper versus the one printed on each mailbox. A brick sidewalk led to a front door painted deep red, offset by white siding, and I stood in place for a moment, contemplating whether it was worth continuing. What I planned on doing was completely unprecedented for me; I wasn’t the bold type. I hated knocking on the doors of relatives I had known for years, let alone complete strangers who intentionally avoided me.
Three cars were parked in the driveway and it was a Sunday morning. I figured someone was home.
I bit the side of my lip. “Now what?” I whispered to myself, frozen in place.
I had a choice to make, and quickly, because soon a nosy neighbor might phone the police to report a shady-looking teenager staring at people’s houses. That was all I needed, to get picked up by the police. I studied the house and thought of new and creative ways to put off the inevitable. Shadows moved inside, beyond the curtained windows, and the anxiety I felt was a vise on my head, slowly twisting tighter and tighter. Our shop class used vises to hold hunks of wood as they were sanded into race cars that ran on carbon dioxide, but no one, as far as I knew, used vises on people. Not since the Middle Ages. I imagined my head was inside one, feeling the pressure on my skull until it would pop like a water balloon.
I’m tired.
I’m too tired to meet Janice. Not the right time.
I don’t know how to talk to people. I act strangely.
I’ll make a fool of myself.
Do I really need to meet her?
I floated over the concrete panels of the walkway and knocked on the bloodred door. It was too late to turn back now. I was surprised I had made it this far. My plan had forced me to trick my own mind into submission. Of everything I had ever done in my life, this was probably the most agonizing to date.
The door opened.
A tall, olive-skinned man answered. He looked Italian or Greek; thin, with salt-and-pepper hair, a turnip-shaped face, and rounded cheekbones like the smoothed ends of a car fender. His eyes were droopy and bloodshot.
“Can I help you?” he asked, his spindly fingers holding the door ajar. He coughed and the extra skin around his Adam’s apple shook.
I stood, frozen, and said nothing. He waited for me to answer but lost his patience quickly.
“Listen, one of your little classmates came by here on Tuesday and I bought two boxes of cookies from him, so I won’t be ordering more today. I’m sorry. Good luck on your little fundraiser, though.” He started to shut the door.
“No, wait!” I shouted.
“Excuse me?” he snapped, reopening the door before it latched.
“I’m actually here to see Janice,” I said.
“Janice?”
“Yes, is she here?”
“I’m her father. Larry Malone,” he said. He eyed me up and down. “What’s this all about?”
“I came to see her.”
He turned toward the inside of the house, leaving the door open. “Janice!” he screamed.
“What?” I heard a woman reply from inside.
“You have a visitor!”
“A visitor? Who?”
“Yes,” he answered, turning to me as he spoke. “A young man, named …”
“Ian.”
“Ian!” he screamed into the house.
I heard footsteps thumping along, and a woman joined Mr. Malone at the front door. She stood eye level with me, her hair dark and curly, resembling the Mediterranean look of her father. Her face was more of an apple shape than a turnip, and like Carla, her hair was shiny and black. I realized that both of Dad’s previous wives had dark hair, but not Mom. Is that why he had stayed with her for so long? I wagered that Dad’s “type” was dark hair, but maybe after two failed relationships with brunettes he decided to go with a blonde like Mom.
The woman at the door flashed a half smile with teeth too white to be natural. “Yes? Do I know you?” she said. Her eyes were very dark. I couldn’t discern the line between the iris and pupil so everything looked black.
“Janice, hi,” I said. “You don’t know me, but …” The veins in my head pumped thick plasma, throbbing, surging adrenaline, and I tapped my palm on my waist to relieve some tension. It seemed a numbing agent had been injected into my lips and I could barely speak. I was so terrified of coming off as a stammering fool that I wanted to shout and keep silent at the same time. “Well, like I said, you don’t really know me, but you knew my father, Thomas. Thomas Daly. He died recently.”
The smile melted down the sides of her face and she stared at me with those black eyes. Mr. Malone, holding the door open with his left shoulder, mouthed my father’s name to her as if I hadn’t noticed. Thomas Daly. A bad word apparently, one they never spoke aloud. Mr. Malone waited for Janice to slam the door in my face, but she didn’t. She nodded at her father and waved me inside.
“Come in,” she said coldly, briefly scanning the neighborhood to ensure I was alone.
Mr. Malone put his long fingers on my shoulder to steer me inside the house, in case I was some type of troublemaker. “Would you care for something cold to drink? A water or pop?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said, slightly aggravated because I didn’t understand people who referred to soda as pop.
We traveled through the living room, where three strangers sat on a caramel-colored leather couch. They stopped talking to examine me, as if I were a servant who’d stumbled into the wrong part of the house. The Malone house was plain and beige, not full of knickknacks, pictures, or decorations like Mom had in our house. Ivory curtains swung from side to side in the front windows like flags of surrender. Janice and Mr. Malone led me down a narrow hallway to an empty study with two white French doors that he opened and directed me through. Mystery novels, the kind for sale at the airport, collected dust on wall-to-wall bookshelves. Empty spaces in the study were decorated with a sparse collection of family pictures. An uncomfortable silence hung in the air. The only sounds were a steady humming from a vent in the ceiling and the irritating tick-tock of an antique clock hanging over the French doors. The clock indicated to me that I could still catch the first bus of the morning, my “escape” bus.
Janice and her father directed me to sit on a leather love seat. Across the room was a small desk with an old fax machine and a round crystal paperweight. Janice took the desk chair, rolled it into the middle of the room, and sat on it backward, facing me.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
I looked down, but not for long. My head was spinning, like a tire stuck in the mud, spinning but making no progress, and that’s when I got hit with another fix of adrenaline. That precious hormone was the only reason I was still alert, but sooner or later it would wear off. For once I wished I had one of the liquor bottles from Rick’s basement. That would’ve helped settle my nerves.
Janice repeated her question: “What are you doing here?”
“I … I…”
“Well, spit it out, answer me.” She kept her voice down, but I could tell she was on the verge of a meltdown. I recognized the signs often enough in Mom. “If you’re here wanting something from me, you can forget it, I have nothing. Thomas owed me thousands of dollars, but I’ve forgotten all about it, and him. I’ve moved on. I forgot about it all.” Her eyes bugged out.
I exhaled loudly. “My sister Catherine and I didn’t know about you until after he died.”
“So?”
“I thought meeting you would be the right thing to do,” I said.
“No need for it. You and your sister may’ve just learned about the real Thomas Daly, but I’ve known him my entire life. Aren’t we all past the point of needing ‘to do the right thing’? If you’re feeling guilty, that’s your own issue to work out.”
“Why would I feel guilty? It wasn’t my fault.”
“Sure,” she said, sighing. “I can respect what you’re trying to do, I really can, but if you think I’m happy you stopped by unannounced, then you’re wrong.”
“I really don’t know why I came today, to be honest.”
She didn’t care what I had to say, yet I needed to keep talking. I couldn’t let her control the situation.
“I walked here, lied to people about it, and maybe hoped there’d be something at the end of it all, you know? Something good? Instead, I’m here and I figured out it’s all for nothing. And you, you just sit there fuming over something that happened years ago.” My eyes tingled and I couldn’t swallow.
Something wet pooled on the bottom of my eyelids and I fought the urge to blink so nothing would roll down my face. The last thing I wanted was for Janice to think I was crying when I wasn’t. Crying changed nothing. For so long I had forgotten what it was like to cry. I always held it together and my heart had transformed into a thorny mass.
All I could do was keep talking until what I felt passed.
“I don’t know what happened between you and my father and I’ll probably never know,” I said, wiping my eyes with my sleeve. “But why punish me for that?”
She nodded in agreement and pushed up her bottom lip. “I can’t give you what you’re looking for,” she said, standing up and abruptly leaving the study.
I put my face in my hands and bent over, hearing Janice’s guests conversing and laughing in the other room. They weren’t talking about me in the study; rather, they were carrying on whatever conversations regular families have when they spend time together. I wondered if this was my cue to leave. I started collecting myself for a discreet exit when Janice returned with a young man I hadn’t noticed upon my arrival trailing behind her.
He was much taller than I and resembled a younger version of Mr. Malone, except for his eyes, which were somehow familiar. Eyes the color of light passing through a bottle of amber whiskey. He was much paler than the rest of the family. I ran through all his characteristics in my mind and finally recognized what was so familiar about him: he had Dad’s eyes. I didn’t, but he did. Mom said I took more after her side of the family. She would’ve preferred I got nothing from him at all.
CHAPTER 19
RECALLING DAD’S FACE WAS CHALLENGING for me now, as if I were trying to remember someone I hadn’t seen in years. Was my mind slowly erasing his image altogether? I couldn’t say for sure whether this was a natural defense mechanism to help me deal with his death or if I was losing my mind entirely. I found it much easier remembering stories about him rather than nitty-gritty details. Out of sight, out of mind. Yet even as difficult as it had become to conjure him, I knew immediately when I saw the young man’s eyes that he was my brother. Trying to describe the qualities of beauty is difficult, for instance, but most people say they know it when they see it.
Janice gestured to the young man, but maintained strict eye contact with me, as if she didn’t want to let me out of her sight. “Ian, this is Cameron,” she said, turning to him. “Cameron, meet one of your father’s other children.”
Cameron, who was a few years older than me, collapsed into the rolling chair vacated by Janice. She shot me a cautionary look and strode back into the living room to join her guests, quietly closing the French doors behind her. I realized that, from the Malone family’s perspective, my sister and I were the others, and I suddenly felt guilty for thinking so negatively of them. I didn’t want anyone to think badly of me. I figured Dad’s family was crooks and con men trying to sell us a lie, but I no longer thought that once I learned the whole story. I couldn’t blame the Malones for having such negative feelings about my father, and by extension, me. They probably hated me and we had never even said a word to each other.
My brother Cameron was very tall and I felt a tinge of jealousy. His build resembled a professional basketball player’s, even taller and ganglier than Scott. He’d obviously inherited this genetic advantage from the Malone side. I shook his oversized hand and mine felt like a small child’s in his. They were similar to his grandfather’s clawlike appendages.
“So, you’re Ian?”
“Yes. And you’re Cameron?”
“Yes.” He scratched the side of his head and tilted it from side to side as if to crack his neck. “I heard Thomas moved to Wellbourne and had two kids,” he said, wasting no time. “After he left us.”
The anger I had so easily detected in Janice wasn’t present in Cameron; either that or he hid it better. Instead, Cameron had accepted the reality of what had happened and he seemed indifferent.
“That’s right. Me and my sister Catherine were born there,” I said. “And my—our—father passed away. Did your mother tell you that?”
“Yes.”
I waited for him to say some words about our father, but none came forth.
“This is all really strange,” I said. “We never knew about any of you until this weekend. I told your mother that, but I don’t know if she believed me. It’s probably why you never heard from us, but I wanted to meet you … as soon as I heard.”
“I met him once,” Cameron said.
“Dad?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
Cameron was too tall for the office chair, which unlike his mother, he sat on conventionally. He leaned back and stretched his legs out for relief. I didn’t offer him the love seat because it might’ve interrupted his train of thought. At first he had appeared unbothered by our discussion, though his face tightened as soon as I asked him to talk about Dad. He glanced away at the bookshelf and proceeded to crack his knuckles. Cameron had clearly run through the details in his mind numerous times.
“He came to town for his mother’s funeral. Our grandmother. I was just a teenager back then and I wasn’t even going to go to the service, but I decided I wanted to see him. My mother told me not to do it, that I would end up disappointed and angry, but I had to.” He explored the room nervously as if he’d never seen it before.
